Mordecai Kaplan

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Mordecai Menahem Kaplan (June 11, 1881–November 8, 1983) was a rabbi and the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism.

Kaplan was born in Lithuania and was ordained as a rabbi at Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York City in 1902. Kaplan began his career as an Orthodox rabbi at Kehillath Jeshrun, a synagogue in New York. He helped to create the Young Israel movement of Modern Orthodox Judaism with Rabbi Israel Friedlander, was a leader in creating the Jewish community center concept, and helped found the Society for the Advancement of Judaism. There, in 1922, his daughter Judith became the first young woman to become bat mitzvah. Judith Kaplan Eisenstein later recalled that her father had thought of the idea only a day before. [1]

Due to Kaplan's evolving position on Jewish theology, he was later condemned as a heretic by Young Israel and the rest of Orthodox Judaism, and his name is no longer mentioned in official publications as being one of the movement's founders. Indeed, in 1945 the Union of Orthodox Rabbis "formally assembled to excommunicate from Judaism what it deemed to be the community's most heretical voice: Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the man who eventually would become the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism. Kaplan, a critic of both Orthodox and Reform Judaism, believed that Jewish practice should be reconciled with modern thought, a philosophy reflected in his Sabbath Prayer Book – the target of the 1945 fire."[2]

In 1909 Kaplan joined the staff at JTS, where he had his greatest impact by teaching Conservative Jewish rabbinic and Jewish education students over a 50-year period. His central idea of understanding Judaism as a religious civilization was an uneasily accepted position within Conservative Judaism, but his naturalistic conception of God was not as acceptable. Even at JTS, as The Forward writes, "he was an outsider, and often privately considered leaving the institution. In 1941, the faculty illustrated its distaste with Kaplan by penning a unanimous letter to the professor of homiletics, expressing complete disgust with Kaplan's The New Haggadah for the Passover Seder. Four years later, seminary professors Alexander Marx, Louis Ginzberg and Saul Lieberman went public with their rebuke by writing a letter to the Hebrew newspaper Hadoar, lambasting Kaplan's prayer book and his entire career as a rabbi."[3]

His followers attempted to induce him to formally leave Conservative Judaism, but he stayed with JTS until he retired in 1963. Finally, in 1968, his closest disciple and son-in-law Ira Eisenstein founded a separate school, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC), in which Kaplan's philosophy, Reconstructionist Judaism, would be promoted as a separate religious denomination.

[edit] Kaplan's theology

Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan's theology held that in light of the advances in philosophy, science, and history, it would be impossible for modern Jews to continue to adhere to many of Judaism's traditional theological claims. Kaplan's naturalistic theology has been seen as a variant of John Dewey's philosophy. Dewey's naturalism combined atheist beliefs with religious terminology in order to construct a religiously satisfying philosophy for those who had lost faith in traditional religion. Kaplan was also influenced by Émile Durkheim's argument that our experience of the sacred is a function of Social Solidarity.

In agreement with the classical medieval Jewish thinkers, Kaplan affirmed that God is not personal, and that all anthropomorphic descriptions of God are, at best, imperfect metaphors. Kaplan's theology went beyond this to claim that God is the sum of all natural processes that allow man to become self-fulfilled. Kaplan wrote that "to believe in God means to take for granted that it is man's destiny to rise above the brute and to eliminate all forms of violence and exploitation from human society."

Not all of Kaplan's writings on the subject were consistent; his position evolved somewhat over the years, and two distinct theologies can be discerned with a careful reading. The view more popularly associated with Kaplan is strict naturalism, à la Dewey, which has been criticised as using religious terminology to mask a non-theistic (if not outright atheistic) position. A second strand of Kaplonian theology exists, however, which makes clear that at times Kaplan believed that God has ontological reality, a real and absolute existence independent of human beliefs. In this latter theology Kaplan still rejects classical forms of theism and any belief in miracles, but holds to a position that in some ways is neo-Platonic.

[edit] References

• Alpert, Rebecca T.; and Jacob J. Staub (1985). Exploring Judaism: A Reconstructionist Approach. Wyncote, Pa.: Reconstructionist Press. ISBN 0-935457-01-1. 
• Kaplan, Mordecai M. [1957] (1981). Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society. ISBN 0-8276-0193-X. 
• Kaplan, Mordecai M. [1962] (1994). The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. ISBN 0-8143-2552-1. 

[edit] External links

• Jewish Reconstructionist Federation
• Conversion to Reconstructionist Judaism
• Role of gentiles in Reconstructionist synagogues
• Introduction to Reconstructionist Judaism
• Reading list
• http://www.shamash.org/lists/scj-faq/HTML/faq/02-06.html
• Role of women in liberal Judaism
• http://www.jewish.com/askarabbi/askarabbi/askr4601.htm